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History of Central Java - Part I

"Indian influence in Indonesia was not primarily the result of Indian efforts to expand their sphere of influence and to export their own culture, but the fruit of Indonesian initiatives to assimilate those Indian elements that appealed to them and that seemed to fit best into the pattern of their own culture. The approach of the Indonesian who visited the Holy Land of Buddhism and Hinduism was an eclectic approach, one of picking and choosing instead of absorbing indiscriminately."

--Jan Fontein

The earliest Indonesians in the anthropological sense probably arrived in the islands of Southeast Asia between three and four thousand years ago, at which time they largely superceded earlier populations. The linguistic and archaeological evidence suggests that these natives may have crossed over from the Chinese mainland via Taiwan and the Philippines.

More than five hundred years before Columbus set sail on his inaugural voyage of discovery, the natives of island Southeast Asia--together with their Polynesian descendants--explored and occupied an area that spanned from Madagascar in the west to the islands of the South Pacific in the east, an area that represents more than 206 of the Earth’s 360 degrees of longitude. Pliny the Elder was the first western historian to mention the accomplishments of these amazing seafarers. Composed during the first century of the Common Era (CE), Pliny's Natural History refers to merchant ships out of Asia who were engaged in trade with the East Coast of Africa. Modern anthropologists have been able to assemble a body of linguistic and genetic evidence that strongly supports the proposition that the island of Madagascar was colonized nearly two thousand years ago by natives from island Southeast Asia.

The earliest known book to attempt to map world geography was written by the Greek astronomer Claudius Ptolemy toward the end of the first century CE. In the “Geographia, Ptolemy wrote about an island located to the east of the Indian subcontinent called Labadius. The island "... is said to be a most fruitful one, and to produce much gold," wrote Ptolemy. "It has a metropolis on the north side toward the west called Argentea...." The name Labadius probably was derived from the Indian Sanskrit word Yavadvipa, the name that the natives of the Indian subcontinent first used to refer to the island of Java in religious texts that were written in the third century BCE (Before Common Era). Archaeological digs in western Java have produced Chinese ceramics that date from the period of the Han dynasty that once ruled China during the opening centuries of the Common Era. These important discoveries demonstrate that western Java had indeed once been a stop-over point along the maritime trade route that connected China with India and Persia. In addition, a Chinese text has been found that describes a mission to China from an undisclosed port that was ruled by King Devavarman. Some scholars believe that this port city may have been located on the coast of western Java. (1)

Anthropologists believe that the natives of island Southeast Asia first began their exploration of the South Pacific about 3,500 to 4,000 years ago. To navigate from island to island, these early sailors had to memorize the vertical star path for any given destination and then sail in the direction of that path by holding the ship’s mast to fix the boat's direction onto one or more of the stars in the constellation. It is only at locations relatively near the Earth’s equator that the constellations present star paths that are nearly perpendicular to the horizon. This may account for the fact that these native Indonesian explorers were able to navigate over vast distances long before Europeans were able to perform similar maritime feats.

To the Beat of a Cosmic Drum

Beginning in the fifth century BCE, the Dongson people of northern Vietnam began to construct large metal drums made out of bronze that were constructed using a special wax-casting technique that allowed the artisans to embed distinctive designs onto the tops and sides of their creations. At several different sites in the Indonesian archipelago, archaeologists have unearthed several fine examples of these artifacts. They represent the earliest known metal objects to have made their way from the Asian mainland to island Southeast Asia.

The tympanums of these drums often feature a central star in relief. The archaeologist H. Quarich Wales believed that this star motif represents the legacy of early Babylonian astronomical observations of how the firmament appeared to circulate around the pole star located over the Earth's North Pole. (2)

With respect to a few of the finer examples of these drums, the star at the center of the tympanum is surrounded by geometrical designs that incorporate a water bird motif. Four metal frogs are also located at equally distant points along the tympanum’s outer rim. In addition, boats have been engraved onto the body of these drum, with each of these vessels featuring a stem shaped like a bird’s head. The ships all sail counter-clockwise, a direction that the natives of the southern Asian mainland have long associated with certain funerary rites. In eastern Java, archaeologists have discovered a large Dongson drum that actually contains human bones as well as man-made objects that represent gifts to the spirit of the deceased. (3)

One particularly fine example of Dongson drum artistry features the figure of a naked steersman who is seated at the ship’s stern. In ancient Mesopotamia, the king of the dead was a naked steersman who carried the departed souls across the sky to the mouth of the netherworld. Certain cultural traditions of Indonesia incorporate the belief that the souls of the dead travel to the netherworld by ship. A central star with twelve points has also been engraved onto the drum’s tympanum, perhaps to symbolize the twelve lunar months of the year. In addition, each of the boats that appear one EaEast

Several early Hindu texts refer to a place in Southeast Asia called the "Land of Gold" (Suvarnabhumi). However, the name does not necessarily imply that this place necessarily possessed an abundance of this particular precious metal. Cloves and nutmeg were so valuable to the mainlanders that their worth far exceeded their weight in gold. It is more likely that the name “Suvarnadvipa” had a more general significance--referring to anything that produces wealth. (5)

For thousands of years, the natives of island Southeast Asia exercised total control over the world's only source of cloves and nutmeg, which they traded in exchange for goods from the Asian mainland. Historians have suggested that these rare spices may have made their way to Mesopotamia as early as 1700 BCE and consumed in China as well as Rome by the opening years of the first century BCE. (6)

The region’s reputation as a land of opportunity acted as a lure for attracting a large number of fortune seekers to the islands. Their arrival provided the natives of these islands with their first introduction to the religious beliefs, literature and culture of the Indian subcontinent. By the 5th century CE, the indigenous rulers of the islands of Borneo, Java and Sumatra had all adopted the Indian kingship model, which must have appealed to the local rulers because it reinforced the divine role of the sovereign in virtually every aspect of human life--from architecture and legal rights to religious practices, language and dance.

It would be short-sighted, however, to attribute the appeal of Indian culture to political considerations alone. The natives undoubtedly embraced this cultural infusion from the north because it presented highly refined extensions of certain religious ideas and principles that the indigenous natives had previously incorporated into their worship of local mountain divinities and ancestral spirits. Numerous mountaintop sites featuring stone megalithic structures have been discovered throughout the Indonesian islands. Featuring terraced stone platforms and large, roughly dressed stones, these sites once served as the focus of indigenous religious rites involving ancestor worship. Although it is not possible to date these structures with certainty, archaeologists believe that at least some of them predate the archipelago's Hindu/Buddhist period.

"Indian influence in Indonesia was not primarily the result of Indian efforts to expand their sphere of influence and to export their own culture, but the fruit of Indonesian initiatives to assimilate those Indian elements that appealed to them and that seemed to fit best into the pattern of their own culture. The approach of the Indonesian who visited the Holy Land of Buddhism and Hinduism was an eclectic approach, one of picking and choosing instead of absorbing indiscriminately." (7)

The predominantly religious nature of this assimilation of foreign influences is illustrated by the way that the Javanese adopted words of Indian origin for their own use. This particular cultural borrowing consisted of words from an ancient Indian language called Sanskrit, which had already become a "dead" language on the Indian subcontinent itself, only spoken during religious rites or used to record various religious scriptures. That the Javanese preferred to adopt thousands of Sanskrit terms instead of words from the commonly spoken dialects of India demonstrates the strong roles that spiritual teachers from the mainland must have once played on the island. (8)

Island Southeast Asia’s wholesale adoption of thousands of Sanskrit words has provided scholars with the means for separating cultural borrowings from India from indigenous beliefs that must have been developed prior to island Southeast Asia’s first contacts with the Indian subcontinent. For example, scholars believe that the natives of this region first learned the skills of rice cultivation, pottery making, cattle breeding, weaving and navigation--including a practical knowledge of rudimentary astronomy--prior to leaving the Asian mainland in search of their new homeland in the south. This deduction is based on the fact that in the local languages of the islands, common terms are used to describe all of these operations that were not derived from Sanskrit. The sharing of these terms among the natives of the various Indonesian islands also demonstrates that they must be among the oldest words to have been introduced, which pushes their origin backwards in time to the second millennium BCE. (9)

The earliest dated stone inscription to be unearthed in Borobudur's general vicinity presents a text that has been composed entirely in Sanskrit. Discovered near the top of a hill located some 10.5 kilometers to the southeast of Borobudur, the inscription of Candi Canggal bears a Hindu calendar date that is equivalent to October 6, 732 CE. The inscription was carved to commemorate the installation of a stone linga--the phallic-shaped emblem of the Hindu god Shiva--by King Sanjaya, who must have been a follower of the Hindu faith. The inscription’s text opens with the following benediction:

"He who is a Sun in the darkness of the world,who has for his crest jewel the Moon on his matted locks,which are beautified by the surging waves of the Ganges River,may Shiva bestow upon you perfect bliss." (10)

A second inscription dating from 782 CE was discovered on the outskirts of the modern-day city of Yogyakarta to the south of Borobudur that commemorates the founding of a Buddhist temple. Called Kailasa in the inscription, the sponsor of this temple is identified as the "Lord of the Mountain" (Sailendra). Several other Buddhist temples in the general vicinity of Borobudur, which were all constructed within a period of about 75 years, were constructed by members of the Sailendra dynasty. For this reason, historians have long assumed that the Sailendra must also have been responsible for the construction of Borobudur.

The Kailasa inscription commemorates the founding of a temple dedicated to the patron saint of sailors, merchants and other travelers known as the goddess Tara. During the eighth century CE, both Buddhists and Hindus alike worshipped this particular female deity. Among other things, the name Tara means "star." The Buddhist scholar Alex Wayman has suggested that the goddess Tara may have once been associated with an ancient stellar cult. The name Tara is based on the Sanskrit root word "tar," which means "to sail across." Did Javanese sailors once associate the goddess Tara with a particular star that they once used as a night-time navigational aid during their journeys to and from the mainland?

Other Javanese inscriptions have been discovered that allude to the fact that the Sailendra often entertained learned Buddhist monks from India and Sri Lanka, which suggests that the Sailendra were at the time involved in the burgeoning maritime trade between the island and the Asian mainland. The following lines from the Kalasa inscription also seem to suggest that Tara may have once played a stellar role in terms of ancient navigation.

"May She, who seeing the worldimmersed in the ocean of existence,may She, the only guiding star of the world,grant your desires..." (11)

A late eighth century inscription has also been discovered on the Malaysian peninsula that commemorates the victories of a Sailendra ruler called Vishnu. "The Sailendra king had the imperial title Rajadhiraja having conquered his enemies and was resplendent like the Sun in the first instance and secondly by his own might, he Vishnu by name, was born of the Sailendra dynasty." (12)

Dating from the time of the Kailasa inscription (778 - 782 CE), the discovery of the Stone of Ligor at a location on the Malay peninsula that is far removed from its base of power in central Java reinforces the perception that the Sailendra dynasty was once a major naval power in the region. Some additional support for this suggestion comes from the inscriptions of the Hindu kingdom of Champa, which formerly thrived in the area of southern Vietnam. These inscriptions record how black-skinned natives from the islands of the Southern Sea had once conducted raids along the Champa coast on at least three separate occasions during the late eighth century CE.

"In the Saka year 696 (774 CE), ferocious, pitiless, dark-skinned people of other cities whose food was more horrible than that of the vampires and were furious like Yama came in ships; they stole a Shiva linga and burnt the temple....” (13)

In 787 CE, a second sea raid took place along the coast of Champa that was responsible for destroying a sanctuary located near the modern city of Phanrang. The inscription “...tells in Sanskrit prose and verse a very similar story, but here the interesting point is that the invaders who had come across the sea are distinctly called Javanese...." (14)